7.
“I met my ex-husband at an amusement park when I was 14 and he was 16. After 13 years of on/off drama (including him being married, adopting a kid, having a biological kid, and getting divorced), we thought we had our shit together and got married when I was 27 (against the wishes of some very vocal friends and family). Over the next nine years of marriage, we moved across the country, had three kids (plus the two he already had), and had what I thought was a pretty great life. But over the following two years, things changed dramatically.”
“His dad got sick, and so my ex’s coping mechanism was drinking heavily on a daily basis. Like a pint of vodka for breakfast, a fifth of Jack for lunch, and a 12-pack of beer for dinner kind of drinking. And he just didn’t stop. He said that his goal was to drink himself to death like Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, and that’s what it looked like. He drove all over the place with our kids in the car without a care in the world. He picked me up from work drunk four out of five days a week. I quit an amazing job because I couldn’t stand working 45 minutes from home knowing that I would walk in to find him passed out on the couch with our newborn child stuffed into his armpit. I called the police regularly, but he was a volunteer firefighter in our small town so guess who got labeled as hysterically overreactive? They’d pull him over drunk with the kids in the car and send him home!
Come to find out, he was also a serial cheater and nursing a newfound love for heroin. He would take his dad’s cancer pain patches, stuff them into his mouth, and down a fifth of cheap vodka to get wherever it was that he wanted to be. And in his family’s eyes, I was the nagging wife that just needed to be grateful to have a ‘healthy’ husband. After so long with this bullshit, I packed up the kids, and the dog, and moved home — 1,700 miles away. He eventually moved, too. Three restraining orders, two nasty divorce trials later, and I was (almost) free. Then the judge mandated 50/50 visitation.
Two more years of misery, and then, he found himself a live-in girlfriend that just happened to look just like me. Over the course of the next nine months, she cared for him, his dying mother, and — during visitation — my kids. Of course, this was a secret I learned about later. She tried to save him from himself — heroin, meth, booze, schizophrenia. And in return, he beat her to death with a baseball bat in the master bedroom of his childhood home.
He claims self-defense because she (5’4, 200 lbs) allegedly came at him (5’10, 250 lbs) with a ‘tactical’ flash light. Fucking coward. … His sister funded a lawyer for me so I could (FINALLY) afford to finalize the divorce. Six years later and we’re still waiting for the murder trial to commence. I’ve worked myself to the bone to provide for our kids all this time. A calm/stable/loving home, good food, security, plenty of toys and games, and recreational/musical opportunities (two of them studied violin)… Guess who they can’t get enough of? Life is not fair.”
—Anonymous
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